Even by celebrity standards, the Tiger Woods cheating scandal was a doozy. The media, both high and low brow, were in a feeding frenzy, and no one outside of the Woods marriage was feeling it more than Ashley Samson.

For a pile of money — reportedly $25,000 — the Las Vegas blonde had ratted on Tiger’s glamorous main squeeze, Rachel Uchitel, who ended up emblazoned across the pages of the National Enquirer.

The weekly came out a day before his infamous Thanksgiving car crash — and by some accounts even provoked it by infuriating his wife, Elin.

In Vegas, Samson was besieged by reporters knocking on her door, day and night.

Barry Levine, the Enquirer’s veteran executive editor and New York bureau chief, knew it was time to protect his paper’s scoop — and its investment.

“I had to do something that I haven’t done in awhile, since the old days,” he said. To wit: spirit his source away to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, in the middle of the night for a week’s stay, until the hubbub had died down. “You do what you have to do to protect these sources.”

Another thing he felt compelled to do before the media mob formed: send two Enquirer reporters to Melbourne, Australia, where, according to a tip received, Woods was rendezvousing in a hotel with Uchitel. “We literally watched her leave her apartment in New York, and get into a Town Car to go to the airport,” said Levine. “We picked her out at the airport in Australia.”

An Enquirer reporter even rode up the hotel elevator with her to Tiger’s floor (the 35th), but drew the line at getting out. “That would have been too suspicious,” Levine explains. “At that point, we felt pretty comfortable that we had the story nailed.”

It was the second huge exclusive for the National Enquirer in recent months, defying critics who believe that its pages are crowded with aliens and flying saucers. (They’re not.)

Besides breaking the Tiger Woods story, the Boca Raton-based tabloid is responsible for sending John Edwards’ career into a death spiral by revealing that the then-Presidential candidate, whose wife Elizabeth has breast cancer, had a mistress, Rielle Hunter. Months later, there was more dirt: that that Hunter had given birth to Edwards’ love child — and splashed a photo of Edwards holding the baby on the cover.

In fact, while the media failed to follow either exclusive, a federal grand jury is now investigating whether Edwards illegally used campaign cash to pay Hunter’s expenses.

Barry Levine, who directed the reporters on both stories, has bragging rights.

SITTING in his cluttered- but- cozy office in Ameri can Media’s Park Avenue offices, Levine, 51, seems more like an old-fashioned newspaperman than the fearsome character who Tina Brown’s Talk magazine once labeled “a tabloid hit man.” A born talker with more than 20 years of tabloid experience to draw upon, Levine earned his chops during his time as L.A. bureau chief at the Star, and then as managing editor of TV’s “A Current Affair.”

Despite his oft-stated enthusiasm for the Enquirer’s obsessive coverage of Angelina, Brad, Oprah, and other show-biz staples, Levine’s heart is in the tabloid’s hard-edged political reporting. When a source told the paper that John Edwards was going to meet Hunter and her baby late at night at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on July 21, 2008, he pounced like a CIA chief, putting together a top-secret team of three reporters.

“We knew that this was going to be, quite literally, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he said.

Levine stayed by his phone in New York as his reporters staked out the swank hotel. Hours went by, and at 2:45 am, the phone call came in. “One of the best phone calls I’ve ever received in my life,” he said.

Levine’s reporter told him that after they had confronted Edwards as he tried to sneak out of the hotel in the middle of the night, he ran into a nearby men’s room. And at that very moment of the phone call, Edwards was pushing to keep two of the Enquirer reporters out of the men’s room, as they pushed to get in. “They were on either side of the door,” marveled Levine. “That really was the moment, if there was a moment in the long history of reporting that story, that I knew the mainstream was not going to avoid the story.”

A few weeks later, Edwards told “Nightline” that he’d had the affair, but denied that he had fathered a child. Now Levine’s dream, his obsession, his Watergate, is to hear a public confession from the fallen politician. “We have not let go of John Edwards,” he proclaimed. “Here we are, all this time later, and we’re still in North Carolina, and we’re continuing to report the story until he makes the admission that he’s the father of the love child.”

YET * the Enquirer, at the top of its form, is too often playing all-star baseball to a half-empty stadium. A decade ago the tabloid averaged sales of 1,750,000 a week. Now circulation is down to about 800,000, and the revenue decline has taken its toll on American Media.

Through much of 2008 it appeared as if the company was headed for bankruptcy. Saddled with too much debt, and with revenue falling 5 percent in the nine months ended Dec. 31, 2008, to $348.9 million, the company produced an operating loss of $154.7 million — compared to an operating profit of nearly $75 million the previous year.

Besides the sliding circulation, American Media, which also owns The Globe, was hit with the conversion of its Star magazine from a supermarket tabloid rival of the National Enquirer to a celebrity glossy — headed by a $2 million-a-year Editorial Director Bonnie Fuller — that didn’t go as smoothly as expected.

Fuller has since left the company and is trying to convert the failed magazine Hollywood Life into a successful celebrity web news operation.

The Enquirer was not immune to internal turmoil either. It moved its base to NYC in 2005 and, to reverse a circulation decline, bringing in a British editor and 22 Fleet Street journalists. It didn’t work and the Brits were sent packing and the paper moved back to Florida in 2006.

Just about a year ago, CEO and chairman David Pecker was able to hammer out a successful restructuring with bondholders of the company that pared its debt from $1.1 billion to $842 million and brought aboard new private-equity investors.

“The irony at this point is that the Enquirer, unlike its long-standing reputation, is really doing good journalism,” said media-investment banker Ken Sonenclar, of DeSilva + Phillips. “Unfortunately, in this down market, the publication is suffering.” Additionally, the market, which includes People and Us Weekly, is overcrowded.

The days when the Enquirer could sell 8 million copies of an issue with Elvis in his coffin are gone forever. But there are still some encouraging signs, said Sonenclar.

While magazine ad pages overall were down an astounding 25 percent from 2008 to 2009, the Enquirer — perhaps owing to the Edwards exclusives — was up, if only 1.8 percent, during the same period, according to Publishers Information Bureau.

Within its peer group, celebrity publications, said Sonenclar, “the Enquirer actually did well.”

It is more difficult for the Enquirer’s editorial staff to win the respect that they feel is their due. Senior executive editor Julia Coates knows that some people believe that the publication constantly gets sued.

“That’s not true,” she insists. “The first thing that people cry out when they get caught, so to speak, is “I’m going to sue,” because then that puts in the minds of the general public, ‘Oh, it’s a lie.’ It’s a good way out. Well, they don’t sue. We get sued much less than major magazines.”

But their fight for credibility is likely to be a frustrating one, said Professor Samir Husni, a magazine expert at the University of Mississippi journalism school, known in the industry as Mr. Magazine. “There’s still this stigma that the content is not true until proven correct by the rest of the media. They have a very uphill battle to fight.”

THERE * is also the matter of money. The Enquirer pays handsomely for some key interviews, a no-no in most of the mainstream press. Levine and his colleagues are unapologetic about their checkbook journalism. “We’re no different than the police department,” he said. “We pay for credible, reliable information.”

Tipsters don’t get paid, he says, unless the story ends up in the paper. “We would be broke, paying people for tips that we couldn’t check out. ”

The blogosphere has proven more accepting of the Enquirer than its print colleagues have.

Emily Miller, a columnist for politicsdaily.com, recently wrote an impassioned essay asking whether the Enquirer deserves a Pulitzer Prize for its political reporting: “The time has come for the media elite to admit that it has an excellent investigative reporting team, which broke the biggest political scandal of 2009, the John Edwards affair.”

But in the meantime, Levine and his Enquirer compatriots are just fine, thank you.

“The beauty of the National Enquirer is that we’ll never let go of a story, and we’ll continue to pound away on that story, until we get every morsel of fact,” said Levine. “As long as our readers are interested in the story, we’ll continue to report it. As that famous saying goes, Don’t pick a fight with people who like to fight.”